The Essay

Kate Kennedy meets musicians who, like her, had to stop playing after injury and reconsider their relationship with their instruments.

We all know that listening to music can have a positive impact on wellbeing and mental health. But what about the performer? The truth is, for anyone wanting to turn professional, this is a highly competitive and pressurised environment often driven in part by fear and anxiety. It's a problem that can have a disproportionate effect on young people - which is why trumpeter Rebecca Toal and cellist Hattie Butterworth started their podcast, Things Musicians Don't Talk About, to try to break the taboo of not acknowledging the difficulties with mental illness that many musicians face. They talk to Kate about their personal experience of 'the system' for training musicians that can so easily break down, often resulting in crippling anxiety and burn-out. Obsessive behaviour and eating disorders are not uncommon as people try to gain some control over the endless cycle of practice and performance. By creating the podcast, Rebecca and Hattie have found a creative way to use their experiences to forge a new and less damaging path for themselves, but also to help others by sharing musicians' experiences honestly.

Presenter: Kate Kennedy

Kate Kennedy meets musicians who, like her, had to stop playing after injury and rethink their lives.

As principal cellist of the Berlin Philharmonic for three decades, Ludwig Quandt performed with conductors Claudio Abbado and Sir Simon Rattle until an injury unrelated to performing nearly ended his career. He reveals what being forced to confront silence means for a musician's relationship with their instrument and the innovative solution he found on the other side of the world from an unlikely source.

Presenter: Kate Kennedy

Kate Kennedy meets musicians who, like her, had to stop playing after injury and rethink their lives. What does being forced to fall silent mean for a musician's relationship with their instrument?

Robin Graham reached her dream as the first woman to earn a principal French horn position in a major American orchestra by audition. She shares her story of how painful injury caused her to leave in 2003 and the grief at being unable to play in the centre of a big orchestral sound.

Presenter: Kate Kennedy

Kate Kennedy meets musicians who, like her, had to stop playing after injury and rethink their lives. What does this mean for a musician's relationship with their instrument?

Aged 11, Stephen Marquiss was labelled an exemplary piano scholar. Gaining a music specialist place in 1990 Stephen promptly attained the highest ABRSM exam mark in the country and reached the televised semi-final of BBC Young Musicians. But then injury forced him to pull out. At 18, his career was all but over, having struggled with recurring RSI, musculo-skeletal issues, which destroyed his confidence and mental health. Ironically, this crisis forced him to address fundamental aspects of how piano is taught and played - and now at 45, Stephen has his own school of playing called Piano Portals, which seeks to rewrite how practice is approached. Kate takes him back to his practice rooms, to help us understand the intensity and the fear of failure that drove him to injury and we learn how his new approach to playing unfolded.

Presenter: Kate Kennedy

Kate Kennedy meets musicians who, like her, had to stop playing after injury and reshape their lives. What does being forced to fall silent mean for a musician's relationship with their instrument?

"My name is Julian Lloyd Webber and I am an ex-cellist". The internationally renowned performer, Julian Lloyd Webber talks for the first time in detail to Kate about the moment he realised his 40-year career could be over mid-recital: "Suddenly I lost power in my right arm - I thought I was going to drop the bow. I had never experienced anything like it - I didn't know what was wrong or what to do. I was genuinely frightened". Julian shares the sense of bereavement he felt after his prestigious career of four decades ended due to a herniated disc in his neck.

Over the next few weeks, Julian tried to pretend everything was normal. His manager was calling him with engagements he had always wanted to undertake, such as a performance of Shostakovich's First Cello Concerto in Moscow. But the wear and tear of Julian's performing career on his body was too much - he learned that the herniated disc was pressing on a nerve which was causing a loss of power in his arm. Doctors told him that he could have an operation, but with little guarantee of success, and with high risks attached. He had a young family at the time, so chose to sacrifice the cello.

He has never played since. Julian and Jiaxin, his wife and fellow cellist, reflect on the last fateful concert they played together and how they've found positives in silence.

Presenter: Kate Kennedy

"Les petites girls Anglaises" was the nickname given by a French journalist to the elaborately costumed and rhythmic Tiller Girls troupe. Adjoa Osei is a research fellow at the University of Cambridge and a former performer herself, and she's been exploring the complexities involved in being a dancing girl in 1930s Paris, appearing on stage alongside the likes of Josephine Baker and French nude dancers. Her essay focuses on the lives of Marjorie Rowland and Mignon Harman.

Producer: Katy Hickman

1574, and a baby girl on board a ship fleeing from France, arrives in London. Esther Inglis went on to become a successful Tudor bookmaker and artist and Eleanor Chan argues that the inclusion of psalm music in the self portraits created by Inglis is a coded way of symbolising belonging at a time of religious strife. The essay draws on research done by New Generation Thinker Eleanor Chan, who has been working as a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the University of Manchester and the Warburg Institute.

Work by Esther Inglis is included in the exhibition Now You See Us: Women Artists in Britain 1520–1920 which runs at Tate Britain until October 13th 2024

You can hear more about Tudor music and art in a Free Thinking episode called a Lively Tudor World which features Eleanor Chan and Christina Faraday. It's available on BBC Sounds. You can also find Eleanor Chan's Essay about another Tudor composer - The discordant tale of Thomas Weelkes.

Producer: Luke Mulhall

"Millons be Free" is a Jacobin song which originally celebrated the idea of the French Revolution, whose tune became the American national anthem. Oskar Jensen sings us the melody and tells us a story involving Alexander Hamilton, the advocate of women's rights Mary Wollstonecraft, Haydn and Hummel at a drinking society, a Liverpool lawyer William Roscoe and William Pirsson, a Chelmsford bookseller who immigrated to the USA.

Oskar Jensen is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, based at Newcastle University working on a project called The Invention of Pop Music: Mainstream Song, Class, and Culture, 1520–2020. His books include Vagabonds: Life on the Streets of Nineteenth-Century London and he also worked on The Subversive Voice research project.

Producer: Jayne Egerton.

How musician Robert Hales and a witty song helped Robert Cecil, Elizabeth I's counsellor, win back the Queen's favour. Documents show us that Cecil supported many musicians, paid for a full-time consort, and had to temporarily dismiss one player for "lewdness". New Generation Thinker Christina Faraday tells the story and explores what we know about the role of music at the Tudor court.

Christina Faraday is a Research Fellow at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge and is the author of the book Tudor Liveliness: Vivid Art in Post-Reformation England. You can hear her discussing Tudor history in several Essays and episodes of Free Thinking available as Arts & Ideas podcasts.

Producer: Natalia Fernandez

Teresa del Riego's work was a staple of early Prom seasons but the anthem she premiered for the suffrage movement in 1911, at the Criterion restaurant Piccadilly Circus, which had 1,000 copies of the song distributed around the country, has not been heard recently. Naomi Paxton shares her research into the compositions of del Riego (1876-1968) and the music making of the suffrage circle. Singer Lucy Stevens performs The Awakening (with lyrics by American poet Ella Wheeler Wilcox) alongside Elizabeth Marcus at the piano.

Naomi Paxton is a BBC/Arts and Humanities Research Council New Generation Thinker on the scheme which helps early career academics share research on radio. You can find her more of her work on suffragette history as Arts & Ideas podcasts, Sunday features and Essays on BBC Sounds.

Lucy Stevens and Elizabeth Marcus have recorded Songs and Ballads by Dame Ethel Smyth and rehearsed this del Riego song especially for The Essay recording.

Producer: Lisa Jenkinson